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flight attendants. And you were asleep,” I pointed out. “I got you a Diet Coke.”
    “Well, that’s the beverage of your choice. Not mine. I wanted Chardonnay.” She rummaged around in the seat pocket and finally found an evaluation form. Under the section on “flight attendants,” she checked off “poor.” In the comment section, she scribbled, “Was not provided with drink.” A picture of the founder of Northwest Airlines appeared on the form’s front page. Nicki drew horns and a beard on it and a balloon coming out of his mouth with a statement urging the reader to perform an anatomically impossible act. “Nicki,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll take that seriously.” She scowled at me, lips pursed, plucked eyebrows drawn, and jabbed one pink-tipped finger at the call button so she could hand the flight attendant her form.
    Nanna, our mother’s mother, greeted us beside the baggage claim. At seventy-six, she was small and trim, with carefully styled frosted hair, wearing one of her array of pantsuits that spanned the spectrum from pale yellow to beige and back again. She tucked her purse carefully under her arm—a precaution against the thieves she believed roamed the world outside of her gated retirement community—and gave us a quick once-over. “How are you?” she asked, kissing us each once on the cheek. “How’s Mother?”
    “Fine,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly true. When I’d gone home for Thanksgiving there’d been a “For Sale” sign stuck in front of the house but, Nicki had told me, nobody had made an offer yet. In the eight months since their divorce had become official, my mom had dragged my father into court twice. Each time he’d promised to pay her the child support and alimony heowed. He’d send checks for a month or two, then he’d stop, and the whole process would start again, with court orders and subpoenas and staggering lawyers’ bills. He hadn’t sent the tuition check to Princeton that fall. My mother and I had gotten a loan as a stop-gap measure until my financial aid application went through. I remembered her detached expression as we sat in a back office of our Connecticut bank, the way her lips had twitched underneath an unfamiliar coat of lipstick as she stared blankly at the stack of documents until the loan officer handed her a pen and pointed out the space for her signature.
    Nanna smoothed her short hair. “Mother told me you have a kidney infection,” she said to my sister. Nicki rolled her eyes and grabbed at her back dramatically. “I’m dying,” she groaned. Nanna glared at me. “How could you let her come here with a kidney infection? Take her luggage!” Meekly I complied, heaving both of our backpacks over my shoulder and struggling with the straps of Nicki’s duffel. Nicki smirked at me, but was quickly distracted by an elderly woman driving a golf cart.
    “Oh, can we get one of those?” she asked.
    “The car’s just across the street,” Nanna said. Nicki weighed her options and elected to continue walking. “I called my doctor,” Nanna continued. “We can see him first thing in the morning. How’s school?” she asked, peering at Nicki through her bifocals.
    Nicki scowled. “It’s a dump,” she cried, and began enthusiastically listing her university’s shortcomings: bad food, ugly guys, clueless roommate, library too far from her dorm, unsympathetic RA, girl across the hall plays Janet Jackson incessantly, infirmary sucks. We walked through the glass doors into the inky Florida night, and the humidity hit us like a fist. I shifted Nicki’s bags in my arms as sweat trickled down my back.
    Nanna led us toward her enormous cream-colored Cadillac sedan. The car had belonged to my grandfather, who’d died in1985, and it still smelled faintly of his cigars. It wasn’t the most practical vehicle, getting, as it did, approximately eight miles to the gallon, but Nanna kept it and drove it at least once a week, all the way to